Renault 12

“You must come to Morocco in a Renault 12 to take up your mother’s inheritance. Mohamed El Khatib’s autobiographical road movie from Orleans to Tangier begins with this call from his uncle. The aim is to initiate the transfer of his mother and at the same time to get closer to the family history in a historical vehicle with cult status. With this collage of documentary film footage, diary entries and intertextual references from Barthes to Cervantes, the French theatremaker creates a field of experimentation in a genre hitherto unknown to him. A result that can best be described as “docufiction”.

With detailed photographs of the road map, El Khatib sketches, like a chronicler, the various stages in his mother’s life, right up to the last, long ordeal in hospital. Authentic audio and video recordings from this time accompany his journey. For his sister, her brother’s philosophical filmmaking is an immoral exploitation of intimate family moments, while an actress friend of his, on the other hand, considers the philosophical blathering of concepts to be useless: “What is the difference to a feature film for you? In the documentary, they only have a small camera that is constantly moving. In the feature film, the camera doesn’t move.”